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Received: 5/2/2002
Accepted: 27/5/2002
Published: 31/5/2002

Abstract

This article reviews the current problems of
the UK railway industry and in particular the effective re-
nationalisation of Railtrack by the government during 2001.
The present state of the industry is placed in the context of
the process of privatisation, and of the historical development
of the sector. It reviews the current literature and media
debate that deals with rail privatisation.

Introduction

During the 1980s,
privatisation and the role of the market were perhaps the key divisions in British politics. This
'clear blue water' was, however, gradually bridged during the 1990s so that by the time of the
election of New Labour in May 1997 there remained few, if any, differences between the main
UK political parties. This erosion of distinctiveness in analysis has had profound implications
for both policy and interpretation of the problems facing government. In this paper I examine
this broader shift in political economy within the context of the railway sector and in particular
the recent events that have led to a partial re-engagement of the state with the industry. The
study highlights the way the original privatisation during the 1990s was based on a highly
simplistic reading of the public sector in general and the railway industry in particular. It is
suggested that the crude insertion of market logic has had profound and long lasting effects
on the social structure of the industry which in turn has resulted in the spate of recent
accidents. I argue that my research into the privatisation of the industry highlights the way
that there has been a deliberate attempt to remove older, more experienced railway workers
and managers and that this process has subsequently restricted a collective ability to respond
to generic problems. I would suggest that this is the logical, if unintended consequence of a
deliberately under-socialised account of the notion of culture apparent in popular
management texts and thinking as well as neo-liberal discourse.

The Politics of Nationalisation
and Privatisation

Writing in a
1938 Labour party pamphlet on the British transport system Peter
Mandelson's maternal grandfather argued that:

If the full advantages of co-ordinated transport
are to be secured we must eliminate the conflicting interests
created by the existence of innumerable separate private
ownerships. These, quite naturally, are chiefly concerned
about advantages for their own individual undertakings.
They do not worry themselves too much about the efficiency
and welfare of transport as a whole. If this is agreed, we
then have to choose between private monopoly and public
monopoly. The trouble about private monopoly is that it is
dangerous for the general wellbeing. The management of a
private monopoly must inevitably be fettered by much state
regulation to protect the interests of the community. A
monopoly which is publicly owned does not threaten public
interests and so does not require such intense state
regulation (cited in Bonavia
1971; 40).

Although
penned nearly sixty years before New Labour's victory of 1997
Herbert Morrison's advice could have formed the basis of the
administration's railway strategy. The fundamental issue facing
politicians since Gladstone's day is how to regulate what is a
natural monopoly service. The lack of a clear policy coupled with
insufficient parliamentary time in the initial term has had, and will
continue to have, major repercussions for the present government,
and runs the danger of turning what could have been a real vote
winner into at best a neutral issue, and worse a vote loser at the
next election. While the effective re-nationalisation of Railtrack by
transport secretary Stephen Byers was a popular move - opinion
polls consistently show over 70% of voters in favour of state
ownership - public perception is of a government responding to
events rather than acting strategically to a well thought through
script.

The end for Railtrack PLC came
over the weekend 6th - 7th October 2001 when Byers refused to extend government funding
and forced the six-year-old company into administration. Without further advances from the
Treasury it was effectively bankrupt, its share price reduced to zero. While the government
studiously denied that this was 're-nationalisation by the back door', there can be little doubt
that the State had regained control of the key part of the railway industry very cheaply. Had it
chosen to purchase the shares before the events of October the government would have
been forced, under European law, to compensate shareholders on the average price of the
stock over the previous three years, £8-9 rather than the trading price of £2.80 at the point of
collapse. Predictably the Railtrack board have fought hard for 'proper' shareholder
compensation, claiming that its troubles were due to government duplicity rather than
corporate mismanagement. In the latest twist the company is threatening legal action against
Byers on the basis of their interim half yearly profits, which they claim show conclusively that
the company was far from 'meltdown'.

What
really did for Railtrack was not government double-dealing but the
underlying structural weakness of the company and the wider
railway industry, coupled with arrogant and incompetent
mismanagement on a gigantic scale. The three crashes at
Southall in 1997, Ladbroke Grove in 1999 and finally at Hatfield at
the end of 2000, and the gradual exposure of the potential
liabilities that the company faced, caused its share price to
plummet to under £4. This collapse in confidence on the part of
institutional and individual investors weakened Railtrack's ability to
raise finance at a time when new calls on its reserves were being
made on a daily basis. Shareholders voted with their feet and in
June 2001 the company tumbled out of the FTSE 100.
Simultaneously, financial analysts at City firm ABN Amro warned
that even at this level Railtrack was highly overvalued, a more
realistic share price, given its exposure was a figure of 58p - this
was a full four months before Byers finally pulled the plug. In
response to these events the company made it clear that it could
no longer be expected to invest in the network at the level it had
formally intended and began to ask for evermore assistance from
the Treasury simply to finance the repairs and renewals it was
currently undertaking.

It was all
supposed to be very different. During privatisation in 1996 much
was made by defensive Tory ministers of the private sector's ability
to raise capital to fund the renewal and expansion of the rail
network without adding to the PSBR. Railtrack's finances were
engineered to give the company an AA credit rating, making it an
attractive investment, and importantly allowing it to borrow funds
more cheaply because of the relative lack of risk involved. At
flotation the stock was valued at £3.90 a share but this steadily
climbed to a high of over £17 during 1998, replicating the
trajectories of previous denationalisations. So proud of their
achievement were Railtrack's senior managers that they insisted
that the closing share price was posted anew each day in the
company's signal boxes alongside such trivial things as traffic
notices and health and safety information.

Railtrack is at the heart of the
Byzantine structure created by the Major privatisation of the early 1990s and understanding
the reasons for its failure tells us much about the problems in the railway industry as a whole.
But, in addition, this story of corporate demise acts as a signal case of the limits to neo-
liberalism and the more general denigration of the public service ethic. Hostility to British Rail
was a theme that united both One Nation and neo-liberal Tories. The State's continued
involvement in this key industry irritated equally both wings of the Party, representing a
monument to collectivism, the removal of which was a genuinely 'big idea' in an era largely
devoid of them - the Cones Hotline excepted. Sir John Stokes, the patrician MP, spoke in a
Commons debate in 1991 comparing the inefficiency of the nationalised industry with the
private companies of the inter-war era:

I remember the thrill of going to Paddington station en
route to Oxford, and I remember the chocolate and cream coaches, the
glorious engines and, of course, the station master in top hat and tails.
Apprentices for the GWR had to go to Swindon to be approved. It was
like joining a good regiment. The Railways were privately owned and
the morale of the staff was high (quoted in Bagwell 1996, 133).

Alan Clark gives an insight into the
Thatcherite attitude towards the industry and its workers during the 1980s in his diary:

I am sitting in a first class compartment of the Sandling train, odorous
and untidy, which, for reasons as yet undisclosed, and probably never to be disclosed
has not yet left Charing Cross. 'Operating Difficulties', I assume, which is BR-speak
for some ASLEF slob, having drunk fourteen pints of beer the previous evening, now
gone 'sick' and failed to turn up (Clark 1993,
169).

Industrial
relations had deteriorated on the railways from 1979, several
disputes being deliberately provoked with the unions by an
increasingly pugnacious management eager to please their new
political masters - Peter Parker (1991,
258-259), BR chairman from 1976 to 1983 described the
drivers' union of being: 'class warriors battling in the trenches of
1919 agreements'.

Throughout the 1980s,
railway privatisation had been rejected on the grounds of
complexity and the recognition of the need for continuing public
subsidy. Even Nicholas Ridley, one of Thatcher's many
Secretaries of State for Transport (1983-1986) and a keen
advocate of denationalisation, advised her that it would be 'a
privatisation too far', and later during the Lords debate on the issue
he actually spoke against it. It was in the wake of the narrow re-
election of the Major government in April 1992 that proposals for
privatising the industry were unveiled. From the start much of the
programme was heavily influenced by neo-liberal 'think tanks'
rather than experienced railway managers. Senior figures in BR
were reluctant to fragment the industry along the lines desired by
libertarians on the prosaic grounds that it was practicably
unworkable. John Welsby, the last Chair of the BRB, reflected that
government ministers at the time:

... didn't understand the nature of the markets they were dealing with,
how to produce train services or what the implications of their decisions were. They
had taken no advice from anybody who knew anything about it (quoted in Wolmar 2000, 128).

John Major had himself mused over the
possible shape that the privatised industry might take, talking of returning to the "good old
days" of the four regional railway companies' (See Strangleman
1999). Major, supported by other chums like Chris Patten, dreamed of privatisation on a
regional basis, recreating the 'sentimental pride' of the companies such as the Great Western
Railway - steam trains framing the vista of old maids cycling around the village green.

However, the eventual sell-off
owed more to utopian market theory than a nostalgia for the golden age of the railways. Of all
the books to have emerged post-privatisation it is a rich irony that the one largely written by
enthusiasts for the sale ends up being the most damning of the process. In chapter after
chapter of All Change: British Railway privatisation - edited by one of the architects of
the sell-off, Roger Freeman (Freeman and Shaw 2000),
subsequently ennobled and now a transport consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers - we
are given a fascinating insight into the debates within government about the detail of the
proposed structure. On the one hand, successive ministers and their advisors wanted as
much competition in the new industry as possible, while on the other were those, equally
enthusiastic for liberalisation, who realised that too much competition would discourage
potential buyers - real entrepreneurs, it seems, don't like competitors. Although the ultra
zealous free-marketeers were reined in this still left the industry split horizontally and vertically
into over a hundred pieces. Command and control, favoured by virtually every railway in the
world since the opening of George Stephenson's Stockton and Darlington Railway of 1825
was replaced by contracts, penalties and key performance indicators.

The railway industry's real
misfortune was that its privatisation took the form of an ideological experiment in the creation
of a perfect market. Earlier denationalisations had effectively seen the substitution of public
sector monopolies for private sector ones - the case initially with gas, water, electricity and
telecommunications. Rail was going to be different! There were to be twenty-five train-
operating companies (TOCs) and two freight units. The rolling stock was owned by three
separate organisations, then rented to these TOCs and simultaneously maintained by
completely different companies. Railtrack owned all of the track and signalling, but contracted
out all its maintenance to a series of engineering companies, who in turn sub-contracted still
further to a myriad of smaller undertakings. This injection of endless competition was not
some accidental, unintended consequence of privatisation, rather it was a deliberate attempt
to introduce market discipline, to create flexibility in the workforce and further restrict the
power of the rail unions. The existing social relations within the industry were targeted for
reform because they were blamed for previous organisational failure - the railways, it was
argued, needed a 'culture change'.

But what of the nationalised
railway itself? On the whole BR's record over its near fifty years existence was not as bad as
is often thought. During the 1980s state support for the railways fell progressively from £1.2
billion in 1982 to £400 million in 1991. By contrast expenditure on roads increased from £3.5
billion to £6 billion. Public funding for BR was, during the 1980s, the lowest in Europe, as a
percentage of GDP, falling from a high of 0.3 % in 1983 to nearly 0.1 % of GDP in 1990. The
European average in the same years was nearer 0.7 % (Bagwell
1996). At the same time parts of BR, most notably the Intercity operation actually turned
substantial profits. Indeed if we look at the whole of BR's existence the organisation did
rather well considering the constant interfering of a succession of politicians and chronic
Treasury short termism (Gourvish 1986; Strangleman forthcoming).

In 1948 British Railways was
charged with the commendable if rather vague objective of providing: '... an efficient,
adequate, economical and properly integrated system of public inland transport' with the aim
of breaking even 'taking one year with another' (Pollins 1971,
168). The nationalised sector, therefore, was never set the task of profit maximisation, but
rather a far more ambiguous target of serving the public good. At nationalisation the railways
were in a mess. The immediate problem was to recover from massive war damage, but there
were far more serious underlying weakness in the industry which dated back to the 19th
century. The railways in Britain were constructed in the age of laissez-faire capitalism,
with successive Tory and Whig administrations consistently intervening only to uphold the
principle of competition, and ensure monopoly abuse was avoided. The result was a network
of rival lines each in competition with the other which in turn fundamentally weakened the
ability of more progressive undertakings to improve their part of the system. Even in the wake
of the government-inspired Grouping after World War One - when 120 separate companies
were amalgamated into one of four new regional undertakings - the absolute size of the
industry remained much as it had at the turn of the century. Even if the London & North
Eastern Railway (LNER), London, Midland and Scottish (LMS), Great Western Railway
(GWR) and Southern Railway (SR) had wanted to make great changes their scope was
limited by a combination of political and public hostility to closure, and lack of investment
funds available because of recession. It was only after the Second World War that real
change could take place and some of the historic problems could be seriously tackled.

BR had inherited a workforce of
over 600,000. By 1979 this number had been reduced by more than two-thirds. At the same
time the system had been dramatically rationalised, services cut, branch lines axed and new
technology quickly eradicated the beloved steam engine. Indeed one reading of the hostility
of the Conservatives towards BR was that it was too successful in bringing about change,
destroying tradition in its self-conscious attempt to move away from steam age technology
and marginal rural markets. In his preface to LTC Rolt's account of the successful movement
to save the Talyllyn railway - Britain's first preserved line - John Betjeman fulminated against
the modernising trend that he associated with nationalisation, suggesting that the volunteers'
success was:

... the result of the independent spirit which still survives
in this country and refuses to be crushed by the money-worshippers,
centralizers and unimaginative theorists who are doing their best to kill
it (Betjeman in Rolt 1961 xix).

The adventures to save the
Talyllyn formed the basis of the script for Ealing Studios' 1952 film The Titfield
Thunderbolt, where a group of villagers attempt to stop their branch line from being closed
by offering to run the service themselves. During the public enquiry it appears that the group
has lost its chance; this elicits an outburst from the local squire against the dead hand of
Whitehall:

Don't you realise you are condemning our village to
death? Open it up to buses and lorries and what's it going to be like in
five years time? Our lanes will be concrete roads, our houses will have
numbers instead of names, there will be traffic lights and Zebra
crossings ... [the railway] means everything to our village.

Titfield prefigures many of the battles
fought out in numerous parts of the country over the next thirty years against the Beeching
axe. During the 1960s BR management attempted to develop a new modern identity for the
railways, a mood in step with Harold Wilson's modernising rhetoric. Symbolically, the most
important moment of this process was the re-equipping of the West coast main line from
Euston to North West England and Glasgow - a line which four decades later contributed
significantly to Railtrack's demise as estimated costs spiralled out of control when it tried to
rebuild it again. Much was made of clean electric traction introduced and the rebuilding of the
London terminal, with the associated destruction of its famous Doric arch, now viewed as the
touchstone of post-war architectural philistinism. Betjeman complained that:

... the architects of British Rail never cease to destroy
their heritage of stone, brick, cast iron and wood, and replace it with
windy wastes of concrete... I became aware that the rich inheritance of
railway architecture from Victorian pride in achievement to Edwardian
flamboyance, declining to the poverty of the new Euston, has a moral.
There was nothing modern to photograph (Betjeman 1972, 9).

The 1960s were
also significant for the attempt to introduce external managerial expertise into
the industry; Richard Beeching, the chairman of BR from 1962 to 1965, had
previously been an industrial chemist with ICI. Traditional railway
management was portrayed by its critics as a closed order of amateurish
enthusiasts rather than commercially-minded professionals. This rather
polarised account rehearsed many of the arguments made during the
Thatcher and Major period and was a major impetus behind the eventual sale.
At the heart of the matter was the consistent belief in public sector failure and
general incompetence. What the railways needed was a new culture, one
where managers would manage rather than be restricted by custom and
Spanish practices engrained in the workforce. Throughout the 1980s BR
underwent restructuring designed to signal to both politicians and workforce
that management was serious about change. Systems of quasi-markets were
created and separate business units, or sectors, formed. The idea behind
these reforms was to break the power of the producers (the engineers) by
empowering the consumers (the commercial managers). BR, it was argued,
had been dominated by a 'production-led' culture, where strategy was made
by technical experts rather than the commercially astute. Unlike the later
privatisation these changes were made by managers who usually possessed
more than a passing acquaintance with railways, for instance Bob Reid, the
chief architect of sectorisation, had joined the London and North Eastern
Railway in 1947. Crucially each of the units created as part of the system was
vertically integrated, individually responsible for its own track and signalling.

By the early
1990s many industry observers believed BR was organisationally stronger
than it had ever been, but unfortunately this was just when the Conservatives
decided to privatise the industry. Speaking in the Commons in 1993
Transport Secretary John MacGregor stressed BR still:

... combined the classic shortcomings of the traditional
nationalised industry. It is an entrenched monopoly. That means too
little responsiveness to customer needs... Inevitably also it has the
culture of a nationalised industry; a heavily bureaucratised structure...
an instinctive tendency to ask for more taxpayers' subsidy (quoted in
Bagwell 1996, 139).

In 1995 Brian Mawhinney, the third of
four ministers involved in the privatisation process, was also critical, arguing that even after
fourteen years of greater 'customer focus':

... the old arrangements were flawed because they were producer-led ...
It was the same old nationalised industry story: the management taking all the key
decisions on a centralised, bureaucratic basis and without a stable financial regime.
The command economy with a vengeance (Department
of Transport 1994, 4).

And it was the desire to
break this link with the past that was so fundamental for the way in which
privatisation was structured. Successive Tory ministers involved in the
process genuinely believed that market pressures would create a climate in
which a real culture change could occur in management and the workforce.
The fragmentation of the industry was seen as an integral part of this change
and not some unfortunate by-product. Ministers and their advisors thought
that railway expertise would unproblematically be cascaded into the new
organisation, skilled and experienced workers simply dovetailing into the
plethora of new units created as part of the process.

The ability to keep the
trains moving whatever happens is an important aspect of the railways and its
management. But this very strength has had the effect of masking some of
the underlying problems in the industry. The fact that the railways failed to
collapse on the first morning of privatisation was taken as a positive sign that
the doom-sayers had been wrong all along and that rail privatisation would
enjoy the success of previous sell-offs, and many of the contributors to All
Change take this line of argument (Freeman and
Shaw 2000). Such was the confidence of the apologists for privatisation
that when the three major crashes occurred at Southall, Ladbroke Grove and
Hatfield those who tried to link them with the way the sell-off had been
structured were roundly criticised; critics argued that each separate incident
was caused by human error or technical failure rather than commercial
pressure or structural problems. Latterly, however, it has become increasingly
apparent that fragmentation of the industry was a crucial factor in each case.

Christian Wolmar's (2001)Broken Rails is a careful
and detailed story of privatisation told through each of the crashes and the
response to them. At Southall a driver's momentary inattention in missing a
danger signal was simply the last act in an unfolding drama of crucial faulty
safety equipment switched out of use, several attempts to get it repaired
having foundered on a breakdown in communication between the various
parts of the new railway and the pressures on inexperienced maintenance
staff. Ladbroke Grove, was again superficially caused by human error, where
a newly qualified driver accelerated through a red signal outside Paddington.
However, as Wolmar explains, this becomes a far more complex tale of
financial pressure on Railtrack during re-signalling carried out in the area, of a
string of complaints about poor sighting of the signal by experienced railway
staff and an erosion in basic driver-training on the part of Thames Trains, one
of the twenty-five train operating companies. Finally, there is Hatfield which
so neatly encapsulate the flaws of the British railway industry break-up that it
will surely form a 'case study' so beloved of management gurus on how
not to liberalise your public services. Like the other two disasters we
find the initial incident was one that has always been a regular issue of railway
operation around the world - a broken rail. What made Hatfield so important
was the way it exposed the fundamental weakness not only in individual parts
of the fragmented railways but also in the relationships between them. Wolmar (2001), Jack
(2001) and Murray (2001) all dissect
complex bureaucratic inertia involved around the basic need to replace a
length of rail in the Home Counties - the damaged rail was known about over
a year before the accident. Each report the arguments between different
contractors as to whose job it was to undertake the remedial work - if the rail
was over a certain length, then a 'repair' is deemed to be a 'renewal' and
therefore the province of another company and a separate contract. The
crash highlights the commercial pressure that all the different parts of the
industry are under from each other as well as the various regulators. Railtrack
incurs fines if they fail to provide paths for train operating companies,
maintenance units get fined if they overrun the time allocated to them for
repair, while the rail regulator imposes penalties on various parts of the
industry if they fail to provide the timetabled service. At Hatfield this chaos
conspired to prevent the faulty rail's replacement for over a year while no one
took responsibility.

Perhaps what is
most cruelly exposed in Wolmar's volume is the lack of engineering expertise
at a senior level in Railtrack. At the time of Hatfield the company's board
contained just two members who had engineering backgrounds, and only one
of those was in an operational position. The chief executive, Gerald Corbett,
had previously been a finance director of drinks group Grand Metropolitan,
and had brought in new management which the Financial Times
(21/5/2001) suggested: 'became symbolic for many railwaymen of the new
culture of bureaucrats and accountants'. It was Corbett who reportedly had
boasted at a lunch of having changed 60 of the top 100 people during his time
at the company. The
result was the semi- paralysis of the network for much of the autumn and
winter of 2000 as 1,200 temporary speed restrictions were hastily put in place
to warn of 3,200 instances of suspected 'Gauge Corner Cracking' - the
immediate cause of the Hatfield crash. This lack of corporate expertise was
no accident. When privatisation was being planned in the early 1990s a
deliberate decision was made to exclude engineering from Railtrack's remit.
The fundamental reason for this was to make the organisation more attractive
to the City, it was calculated by government advisors that including the
mundane aspects of track repair and renewal would dent institutional
enthusiasm for investment in the company. What was left in the package
were large amounts of sexy prime real estate, particularly in large cities, which
was ripe for redevelopment. Track repair and renewal was hived off into a
series of twelve track maintenance and renewal companies which
competitively bid for work on offer from Railtrack. Many of these firms were
themselves snapped up by civil engineering groups eager to move in to what
they saw as a potentially lucrative area. Railtrack ruthlessly used this
competition to force down the price it paid, manically creating a series of
Dutch auctions among competitors who in turn cut costs by laying off risk onto
numerous sub-contractors. It has been estimated that there are now over a
thousand contractors working on Britain's rail system ranging from some of
the biggest civil engineering firms to temporary workers recruited in pubs.
Jack suggests that BR used to employ over 30,000 full time track workers,
post privatisation, however, this figure dropped to between 15,000 and
19,000. Coinciding with this fall in the size of the permanent workforce
hundreds of specialist employment agencies have sprung up to service the
new desire for temporary flexible labour poignantly dramatised by Ken Loach
in his film Navigators - several television critics grudging accused
Loach of being nostalgic in his portrayal.

Interestingly, much of the
criticism of the industry post-Hatfield focused on the lack of a skilled workforce who either
failed to identify the problem before the crash or were unable to cope with its aftermath -
between 40,000 and 60,000 railway workers were made redundant during the restructuring of
the industry from the early to mid-1990s. The Financial Times (22/2/2001) reported:

The first consequence was the breakdown of the old comradeship,
which used to mean that the problems were easily spotted, repairs made, and people
could talk to each other. Track workers operated in gangs and knew their stretch of
rails like their own back gardens. Instead, workers became nomadic, moving to the
next job with little or no local knowledge and instructions not to talk to rival
workers.

Other parts of the media
were also filled with such accounts, with enthusiastic journalists warming to
their subject in reporting the recruitment of ex-army personnel or more
desperately Italian, German, Indian and Romanian rail engineers.

Much was made of the
incompetence of senior figures in Railtrack and their lack of railway industry experience.
Within the industry, Hatfield finally allowed more experienced managers to voice doubts about
the faults of privatisation. Chris Green, the head of Virgin Trains and a career railwayman
who began in the industry as a BR management trainee in the early 1960s spoke of 'a
collective loss of memory on the basics of running a railway' and suggested 'Old skills have
not been valued and experienced staff have been dismissed in ill-considered cost-cutting
initiatives' (Rail 21/2/01).

This sense of past experience
being deliberately devalued was a recurring theme in the research I carried out during and
after privatisation. As one signal worker in his 60s said:

If the old men, old railwaymen, if they start to talk about
the old days a glazed look comes over the eyes of [new] management,
they're not interested. It's 'Oh here we go again, the "Olden Days"
(John Porter, signalman Railtrack, interview 1995).

The marginalisation of
established workers transcended the divisions between blue and white-collar
staff. A Railtrack manager who had over three decades of experience
described key operational meetings where he and another colleague would be
the only long-serving railway personnel present. He observed how younger,
but more senior, colleagues' eyes would roll every time he tried to make a
comment based on previous events or incidents that might have occurred two
decades before:

Because it happened 20 and 15 years ago, or before that,
they find that threatening because they can't identify with what we're
about...Oh yes, that railway culture's been challenged, but at the end of
the day, for as long as we intend to run trains, there'll be problems and
by all the old hands being told to shut up and get out, somebody should
say "hang on now, why didn't we listen to them" (Railtrack Manager,
interview 1997).

This manager went on
to say that in the end he usually kept quiet in such meetings rather than
provoke a confrontation which could have major implications for his career. At
the same time that experience was being devalued comparative inexperience
was being privileged. A Rail Maritime Transport (RMT) union official
explained:

They [the train companies] have got a policy of recruiting
as much as possible from the street, you know, young keen people that
they think will be completely malleable, won't be trade-union minded
and they will be able to do what they want (RMT interview
1998).

In a
sentimental piece reflecting on the opening of a new annex to the
London Transport Museum, this narrative of a loss of skill during
privatisation was prefigured by Guardian journalist Jonathan
Glancey. He lamented the demise of the railway work ethic,
arguing that it, too, was now only fit for the museum. Comparing
contemporary workers with past generations of train drivers he
suggested: 'Such men were like champion jockeys in charge of
mechanical racehorses looked up to by even the most expensively
educated British schoolboy', continuing:

More importantly, they were well read, dedicated union
men, who learned their craft, as well as the ideas of Ruskin, Morris and
Marx, in evening classes and in oily depots. They were truly the
aristocracy of labour. Not today. Those working for the privatised
transport companies run by former supermarket managers and second-
hand car salesmen have become little more than the "lump"
(Guardian 22/9/99).

Nostalgia for a lost
workforce has been one of the most intriguing themes of post privatisation
commentary. Railway workers it seems are back in fashion after having spent
most of the era of nationalisation as popular and political folk devils. But as so
often is the case this rediscovery of loyal and committed workers selflessly
beavering away coincides with their near-final demise. This theme of loss is a
perennial one with few generations not attempting to claim that they are the
last authentic railwaymen. Some date this loss from the Grouping of the
railways in 1923 which destroyed the individuality of 120 companies. For
others it was nationalisation after World War II that snuffed out occupational
commitment, while others point to the end of steam in the late 1960s as the
actual terminal point. So regularly does this sense of decline surface in
railway historiography that it is possible to trace it back to the earliest decades
of the industry in the nineteenth century. During the late 1840s, for example,
contractors and engineers lamented the death of the 'genuine navvy',
moaning that 'navvies weren't what they used to be'! (Coleman 1968, 68). In this respect Off the
rails represents continuity, the volume populated by workers who describe
a frightening world increasingly dominated by 'flip-chart merchants' rather than
skilled professionals, a place where good operating practice is subsumed
under piles of paperwork and blame-attribution forms. All of the voices here
lament the passing of BR, referred to by one employee as 'mother railway',
but this sense of loss is complex and if there is nostalgia here it is qualified, as
one driver concedes: 'Some of the old BR managers were bastards but they
knew the railway'. What many railway workers grieve for is not a lost utopia.
Rather they speak of an absence of intelligibility and rationality in the new
railway - another driver notes ironically 'If the unions had put forward this way
of working, we'd have been called Luddites' (Murray
2001, 102). They lament the passing of an era where decisions reflected
the need to provide a service rather than avoid the imposition of fines or gain
key performance indicators. In one passage after another established
workers talk of the distaste expressed by the new players in the industry for
the 'old railway' 'they didn't want old railway people, they said "you've got old-
fashioned railway ideas".

Discussion and Conclusion

I started my
doctoral research upon which this paper is based just as the railway industry
was being privatised and broken-up (see Strangleman 1998, 1999; forthcoming).
During the research process I gradually developed a greater understanding of
'railway culture'. In management and political thinking, railway, or any public
sector culture for that matter, was and is often dismissed as being old
fashioned, backward-looking and hidebound. Much effort has been put into
attempts to change the 'culture' of this industry with little or no attempt to try
and define what was meant by the term, still less whether changing it was
either possible or desirable. Rather, what has occurred over the last two
decades has been the neglect of more subtle sociological discussion of
culture - understood as a broad set of meanings and values - and the
imposition of a one-dimensional economic reading of social interaction and
change (Eagleton 2000; Parker 2000; Smith
2000; Strangleman and Roberts 1999).
What has emerged is a vision of individual and collective action being driven
almost entirely in response to market signals, a vision of 'the social'
thoroughly disembedded from the economic. In designing the structure of
railway privatisation the Conservatives went further down the road of creating
a 'perfect market' than in any of their previous attempts (Williams et al 1996; Wright 1994). In the process they have done serious
damage to the social relations in the industry that had been produced and
reproduced over time. The skills and knowledge within the industry have
always been rooted in informal and tacit networks of social relations. Workers
have traditionally been socialised into this complex occupational identity and
often based their whole careers within the industry. From the life histories I
reconstructed as part of my research, and from other scholars working in the
area, it is possible to understand how this culture was both vibrant and
inherently flexible in that it could respond to change precisely because it was
rooted in collective experience (Strangleman
forthcoming; see also McKenna 1976,
1980; Revill 1991, 1994). In crude neo-liberal
readings this culture appears valueless, backward-looking and as if change is
resisted by a largely nostalgic workforce wedded to a 'Golden past'. I want to
argue that it is precisely because of the subtlety and complexity of this
workplace culture (however that term is defined) that it was easy for neo-
liberals to ignore its value and meaning, and end up blaming the workforce for
being responsible for the industry's decline.

Similarly, it is important
that in valuing an old industrial culture we don't fall into an unreflective
nostalgia ourselves. Jonathan Glancey's quote above is representative of a
romantic idealisation of work cultures of the past that perhaps does more to
obscure rather than illuminate what was, and is, being lost from the collective
railway workforce. While the railways had their fair share of autodidactics the
average railway worker was neither hero nor villain. Railway culture could be
both inclusive and supportive and at other times exclusive and narrow.
However, while sharing collective traits this was a dynamic heterogeneous
working class culture which changed subtly over time and across generations.

Labour's problem in
1997 was that it inherited a system deliberately designed not to be unpicked.
British Rail was disembowelled, fragmented vertically, horizontally and
temporally; its parts sold off in a variety of ways so that it could never be put
back together as it was. This represents both a problem and an opportunity -
for few would view BR as having ever been perfect. Understandably John
Prescott during the first term recognised that the last thing the industry
needed was large-scale upheaval and decided to try and work within the
confines of the structure he was bequeathed. Blair reportedly didn't recognise
the industry as a priority and thus change, where it has been made, is largely
piecemeal. The poverty of such a stance has been cruelly exposed over the
course of the last year as the logic of privatisation gradually, but remorselessly
works itself out on a day-to-day basis. Just as large-scale railway investment
takes a long time to come on stream so too do the faults in the system. At the
moment, Labour can blame the problems of privatisation on the
Conservatives, and the charge is legitimate and will continue to stick. But the
public seem increasing likely to ask why, if the system is so wrong, are large-
scale changes not now being made - private polling for the Party suggests a
minus 49% rating for their performance on rail. At the moment government
policy seems to be the modest aim of tinkering with individual franchises
rather than seriously tackling a fundamentally flawed system. There are many
options available to Byers or his successor (for most transport ministers only
last a year or two), including full re-nationalisation. If political ambitions are
more limited, then government control of Railtrack is a good place to start.
Maintaining, renewal and creation of new capacity in the industry is expensive
and the lead-in times are glacial, but is nonetheless vital. Such investment
should be made by the state for the long term strategic good of the public and
not by train operating companies who have to turn profits in months rather
than decades.

The signs, however,
are very mixed; Railtrack's administration is likely to drag on into the summer
of 2002 at the earliest and Byers' star is on the wane. In the meantime the
Public Private Partnership on the Underground looks like being even more
complex than mainline railway privatisation, while a resurgent road lobby
makes radical change in transport even harder. In addition, is the continued
blanket criticism of the public sector, which is still perceived in government
circles as inherently inefficient when compared to the private. The continued
baiting of public servants is damaging and counter-productive. 'Railway
culture', or the wider public service ethic for that matter, is, or was, a priceless
intangible asset that is difficult enough to capture in the finest sociological
mesh, let alone the accountant's balance sheet. One of the main reasons the
railways still work, after a fashion, is because of the skill and commitment of
the old nationalised workforce. It is time this was properly valued rather than
disregarded in the genuflecture to all things private. New Labour once made
a virtue of being non-ideological in its policy making. Now, in its search for
solutions to the problems of the public sector, it should remember its own
dictum - 'it's what works that matters' - clearly private involvement in public
transport doesn't.

As I write trains
have once again started running past the site of the latest crash on Britain's
rail system at Potter's Bar. Again there has been much speculation as to the
extent to which this incident can be blamed on privatisation and the
subsequent loss of skilled workers. The idea that workplace culture is more
subtle and valuable than has been acknowledged in the past may be
becoming more acceptable than it has been over the past two decades. In his
report in to the Southall train crash in 1997 John Uff makes the following
observation:

The lesson to be learned seems to be that compliance with Rules
cannot be assumed in the absence of some positive system of monitoring which is
likely to detect failures. Such a conclusion would, however, be a sad reflection on a
fine industry which has been created through the enthusiasm and support of
countless individuals who were proud to be thought of as part of "the railway".
Perhaps the true lesson is that a different culture needs to be developed, or
recreated, through which individuals will perform to the best of their ability and not
resort to delivering the minimum service that can be got away with (Uff 2000, 202) (emphasis added).

It seems to me that sociologists need to be bolder in their public
interventions when politicians and managers make use of core sociological
concepts such as culture.

REVILL, G. (1991) 'Trained for life: Personal identity and the
meaning of work in the nineteenth-century railway industry', in C. Philo, (ed) New words,
new worlds: Reconceptualising social and cultural geography, Lampeter: Department of
Geography, St. David's University College.